The State of Finance and Accounting Talent (March)

Welcome to our SECOND state of finance and accounting talent! I write this on a plane home from Disney. A place where you apparently should NOT bring your four year old daughter on splash mountain and sit in the first row right before the princess meet and greet. A lot of wet tiaras and screaming.

Before I forget to do the button thing:

Yea, so I’m going to start doing these on a monthly basis now that I’m running a boutique recruiting firm on the backs of this newsletter.

For those whom I haven’t bothered yet, it’s called Mostly Talent and we specialize in placing manager, director, and VP level finance and accounting pros. 

These updates will take the following format (until I inevitably wake up and choose to change them, as one does) 

We’ve officially progressed past the stage of evaluating if this AI thing is real, specifically for finance and accounting. We knew it could code, but what about the sub ledgers. Don’t forget about the sub ledgers.

The future is here, but it’s not evenly distributed. 

It would be hard to deny that you don’t get more efficient with AI. I’ve been doing these tutorials on building with Claude and excel and I mean holy shit.

As a result, employees and employers are now sizing each other up, trying to figure out what this means for their relationship. Has the implicit agreement and way in which

changed? 

If we hit pause on the company cost / benefit for a second (it’s great), I want to zoom in on the individual. 

Assuming I have a job, and I’m able to work faster and better and I’m AI maxing like Clavicular, how does my 1) paycheck and 2) balance of time change?

To take those one at a time, if your effective value to the company was $1m per year and they paid you $250k of that, now your increased productivity makes you worth $2m, so how much of that value accrues to you personally?

Does the company capture it all?

It’s a strange time when trying to assess what you are worth in the workplace. Finance, and especially accounting, are having their 10x engineer moments. And it’s unclear how to split the spoils.

Oh and then the time part. 

A quick PSA that the 40 hour work week is a relic of the Industrial Revolution. This was a time where you needed to physically be present at a factory to get a specific widget output per hour (“how many candle sticks did you make today, Jane?”). But we’ve largely continued to adhere to it. Alas…

If you can do your previous 8 hour per day job in 5 hours, what happens to the extra 3?

Do you:

a) Fill that time with additional work, but work the same total time (a net gain of +3 hours to your employer)

b) Get that time back to yourself and take your dog Walter for more walks and learn how to play the drums (a net gain of +3 hours to you)

c) Actually work more and run more scenarios and tests and gobble gobble tokens because we must accelerate and ascend and build (a net gain of…I don’t even know)

It’s C. Of course it’s C. When excel came out investment bankers worked more, not less. I really think something unplanned is happening - people are taking the 8 hours to 10 hours to try to work on more stuff (notice I say more and not necessarily better or more answer changing stuff). 

BC NGL - Consuming tokens is wicked addicting. 

I’m typing this by hand right now, not consuming any tokens, and my mind is saying why the fuck aren’t you consuming tokens? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, were any tokens consumed?

Ok let’s talk about the employer side. 

The hunt for a hungry, motivated, AI first tinkering number 2 has never been thirstier.

I joked with my recruiting partner Callie that instead of Mostly Talent, we should have called our recruiting company #2 Talent.

But there would be a lot of unspoken jokes about being second best in our category (or about pooping… neither part of our initial brand pyramid)

Much of what we’re hearing from hiring managers goes something like:

The floor is the same but the ceiling is much higher.

And to bring it all together, AI is seemingly opening the door to step up candidates.

Why? Well, the required skill sets for a Director of FP&A are changing (and increasingly unclear). It’s no longer just about managing people. Yes you should be able to manage a senior analyst but you should also be able to:

And what’s really really cool is we’re seeing hiring managers totally willing to lean in. They realize that what got someone from manager to Director three years ago are probably not the same technical skills that you’d assess them on today. And the skills pay the bills. 

(We had one candidate build a sample operating model using Claude for his manager interview. The CFO spat out their latte. It was dope.)

I've never been so excited to help bridge the gap between hiring managers and candidates.

Consider us a market maker for your right hand person (ok that’s a better moniker than #2 Talent. Should have went with that).

Thanks for hanging out with me and Callie in this second issue. 

If you’re looking to hire go here. We can activate your pipeline overnight with candidates we’ve pre vetted and spoken to:

And if you’re passively open to new roles go here:

Wishing you strong and brave talent,

CJ